“Yellowjackets” is at its best when its characters are doing their worst

I was happy when Jackie froze to death.

Elated when Biscuit’s severed head was discovered on an altar.  

And let out a guttural, “Hell yeah” when, kneeling in the snow to present a dripping bear heart to the wilderness, Lottie (Courtney Eaton) ended the first season of “Yellowjackets” with a sentence that encapsulated the entire show in terms of what viewers signed up for by watching, where it would be heading in further seasons, and what could be expected in the eventual outcome in the series finale: “Versez le sang, mes beaux amis.” Which, translated from French to English, means, “Spill the blood, my beautiful friends.”

Unlike the duplicitous characters it centers on, “Yellowjackets” introduced itself in its 2021 premiere as exactly what it is, a show about the worst. The worst things that could happen to a person, the worst things that a person could do to others, and the worst things that a person could do to themselves. And it’s at its best when it remains true to itself.

In real life, every day is a new opportunity for betterment, but seeing the practical ins and outs of that in a thriller drama television series would be extremely boring. Even in reality TV, it doesn’t really work. On something like “Queer Eye,” sure. Who doesn’t enjoy living vicariously through another person’s glow-up when you’re in the mood for such a thing and press play on a show that’s expressly about just that. But in shows like “Vanderpump Rules” and “Real Housewives,” ratings tank when everyone’s trying not to do cocaine and not get piss drunk and fall into a bush during a girl’s trip to Turks and Caicos. Sometimes — most times — the mess is the allure. I spend enough time sitting around the house worrying about what I said to someone in high school that may have hurt their feeling so bad it turned them into a cannibal. I don’t need to watch someone go through it on TV. I’d rather see what the cannibal is up to.

Compared to the first season of “Yellowjackets,” which has a 100% on the Tomatometer and, in my own opinion, is one of the best first seasons of a show to ever be made in terms of the full package of writing, casting, acting, the look of it, the pacing, right down to the soundtrack; Season 2 saw a decline in just about all of it that even doubling up on Tori Amos songs couldn’t help because the bulk of the season revolved heavily around both the teen and adult timelines trying to fix things.

Ranking 94% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 44% with fans, Season 2 did still have some banger moments like teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) biting a chunk out of dead a** Jackie’s ear to the tune of “Cornflake Girl” and adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) quivering with excitement while brandishing a gun to reclaim her stolen minivan, but the exciting savagery of the teen timeline in the wilderness — even reluctantly, or purely for survival — up against the sorrowful, regretful, half-hearted and misguided attempts at grappling with the trauma of that savagery in the adult timeline tipped the scales too heavily in a way that I, and I would guess many other viewers, prayed for additional scenes of the adult cast flipping out that either didn’t come or didn’t come enough. 

Steven Krueger as Ben Scott in “Yellowjackets” (Colin Bentley/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME)But then, something truly puzzling happened in the lengthy span of time between the end of Season 2 in 2023 and the start of Season 3 in 2025, viewers must have forgotten what originally drew them to this show, or perhaps what they wanted to get from it, because the first half of the season drew complaints of “this is boring,” and now, midway through when things are finally getting super dark and stabby stabby again, many viewers are angry or in tears that additional fan-favorite characters have been killed off. 

But . . . but . . . things are getting bad. Like, headless Ben (Steven Krueger) bad. And if the show keeps hammering it down in this way through the end of the season, things should only get worse, if only to deliver on the promise that was initially made by “giving it what it wants.” And by “it,” I mean us.  

What sense does it make to cry “boring” when the cannibal show’s characters are making tapioca at nursing homes or brushing each other’s hair and tending to baby goats and then flood social media with “I’m mad!” when the blood starts flowing? The blood is the point. The anguish is the point. 

Of all the promises made on or about this show, a happy ending was never one of them. 

Good. 

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Across the series’ three seasons, so far, there have been a number of major deaths in both the teen and adult timelines in telling the story of the aftermath of a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team crashing in the middle of a remote Canadian forest and doing literally whatever to survive and the after-aftermath of that, where the members of the team who made it back to civilization are now balancing the mundanities of adulthood with the fact that they’re deeply deeply f**ked up. And the deaths that take place in the teen timeline have a different impact than those that take place in the adult timeline because it’s one thing to see a person just starting out in life survive a plane crash and then die in the dirt without ever making it back to their bed at home, and another for a person who made it through all of that hell, back to safety, only to die relatively young anyway, likely at the hand of someone they’d trauma bonded with 25 years ago in the wilderness, with its screaming trees and whatever the hell else we’re made to wonder about lurking out there.

L-R: Simone Kessell as Lottie, Sarah Desjardins as Callie and Melanie Lynskey as Shauna in “Yellowjackets” (Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME)The death of adult Lottie in Season 3 is, actually, something to be mad about — not in and of itself, but because there was so much buildup to her character with the spooky French and the hearing the wilderness and the mystery surrounding the death of Travis (Kevin Alves) and the “cult,” only for her to be thrown down some stairs as a way to, what, give Walter (Elijah Wood) something to do? But the death of Ben after being found guilty of burning down the cabin in Season 2 was the right move to push things forward here because, like Jackie in Season 1, he was an innocent and, therefore, finishes what Jackie’s death started by taking with him any remaining humanity that was left in the people hutted up in those woods. Good. Good for us. Because that means that from here on out, we likely won’t need to suffer through the pretense of the surviving characters in the adult timeline trying to “be better people.” We’re past that now and we know, just as they know — under the slipping masks they’ve been holding in front of them — that nothing good made it back from those woods. 

With the death of Ben, a conversation between Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) and Misty (Christina Ricci) in the third season’s second episode takes on deeper meaning, although it likely wasn’t intended to.

During a game of truth or dare forced upon Misty and Lottie as a way for Callie to learn more about what exactly happened while her mom and her soccer friends were stranded in the woods, Callie says, “I wanna know what ‘it’ is,” meaning the spooky forces in the woods that served as good excuse for teenagers to kill and eat each other.

“Well, that’s too bad,” Misty replies.

Let’s hope it was. Let’s hope that it was worse than we could imagine and that we get to see more of it. It’s what “it” would have wanted.